Quarter Circle Forward: Quite Cool and Fun

For Empiricism in Game Design

Riot Games recently¹ released a new trailer for Project L, their upcoming fighting game with one-button special moves. Just-released DNF Duel has one button specials, as does the “modern” control scheme in Street Fighter 6. Eschewing special move motions optionally or entirely is becoming a genre norm.

You can find detailed arguments online for and against special move motions. Like many fighting game veterans I fall more into the “for” camp, but I’m not going to rehash those arguments and try to sway you via an avalanche of sensible-sounding analysis. Instead I’m going to use a different style of argument that game developers shy away from too often:

The Proof of the Goop is In the Tasting

I once found myself up at 2 AM watching a cooking competition show on Bravo. One of the challenges was to take the classic French dessert “Chocolate Pot de Crème” (a cup of goopy chocolate) and add a twist. A contestant added a salty pretzel element and the chef was having none of it, screaming about how adding anything savory to Cup de Goop is an insult to French cuisine. But everyone who tasted the dessert loved it!

Imagine someone puts two cups of chocolate goop in front of you. You try both and the one with a salty twinge tastes better, much to the chagrin of a French Chef. “I’m classically trained and have 3 Michelin Stars,” he argues. “I used time-tested techniques and a recipe passed down by French masters.” Maybe instead of appealing to his own authority he uses more sciency-sounding arguments: “this recipe has evolved over hundreds of years and salty variants have been filtered out by natural selection.” Maybe there’s a molecular explanation for why pretzel and chocolate don’t mix - in theory they produce a bitter unpleasant taste when combined. These might be great-sounding arguments but they don’t change the taste of either cup.

Game development is a largely technical field and many developers are “left-brained” types - people who are smart and rational and good at arguing. They argue about tabs vs spaces, whether you should line-break before a curly brace or which game engine is best. But winning a debate isn’t the same as being right. People make all sorts of convincing arguments about production methodologies, and if you listen to an impassioned speaker defend their preferred one you may be swayed. But production methodologies are interchangeable squabble fodder.

On the Limits of (Over) Intellectual Analysis

A common bit of advice for someone stuck on a yes-or-no question is to make a list of pros and cons. I personally don’t find this approach useful and I’ve heard a good explanation why: making a list forces you to focus on things that are easily stuck in a list. If you’re debating leaving your significant other you might write down “leaves socks lying around” and leave off “when I come home from work after a hard day they can sense that I need cheering up, say just the right thing and order me a meatball sub” - the latter feels more subjective and less quantifiable.

Something similar can happen in game development. Take the following comments on special move motions from Reddit.

I suspect many would consider that first comment valuable and the second fairly useless; it’s not explanatory, it’s not "objective.” To return to the food analogy, it’s like someone saying “I dunno I just like the salty goop.” But if they like the salty goop that’s pretty important if your goal is creating a tasty dessert, even if they can’t explain why.

What rubs me the wrong way about the debate over special move inputs is that “I like them they’re fun” is often rejected as an unserious argument, when it’s actually the most important argument.

Introducing “Hand Feel”

According to Wikipedia game feel is:

the intangible, tactile sensation experienced when interacting with video games. The term was popularized by the book Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation[1] written by Steve Swink. The term has no formal definition, but there are many defined ways to improve game feel. The different areas of a game that can be manipulated to improve game feel are: input, response, context, aesthetic, metaphor, and rules.

This isn’t a particularly good definition - something can’t be both tactile and intangible, and common game feel subjects like jump timings and arcs aren’t really “tactile.” The tactile part of video games, the literal rather than metaphorical feel element, is manipulating a controller with your hands.

I bought King of Fighters 15 but didn’t have much time to play it on release and quickly fell behind other players online. (KOF has never really been my thing anyway) So I’ve played mostly offline including training mode - the game has great “hand-feel.” It has traditional special move motions but with a number of conveniences. If you input a special move early and hold down a button the move is buffered for some time, so you can be a little sloppy with timing. Doing a normal fireball into a super fireball, QCF into QCFx2, can be done as QCFx2, because the first QCF that does the fireball also counts as the first half of a super fireball motion. The result is a game that feels technical but not obnoxiously so, and that is fun not just to play but to operate.

In Tekken King’s chain throws are fun. They require a lot of “superfluous” button presses and memorization - something many game devs would frown upon - but there’s an intense satisfaction from entering them correctly. The same is true of tricky combos or moves like EWGF² that require tight timing. I suppose it’s fair to ask what makes these satisfying but I think it’s fair to answer “I don’t know.” Maybe one answer is that pulling off something brain-dead easy is less satisfying than gaining and then demonstrating some level of mastery, in the same way that developing a good tennis backhand feels good. But there’s more to it than the satisfaction of improvement - there’s also a satisfaction that comes from the movement of hands and fingers. Finishing a King chain throw by slamming all four face buttons with the palm of your hand is like finishing a piano concerto by triumphantly slamming the final chords. If you could play the piano by mashing one key over and over would that be better? It would certainly be easier and more “accessible” but my answer is no. Playing the drums elicits a certain joy that programming a drum machine lacks.

There are certainly games that take mechanical dexterity too far - the Street Fighter 4 “focus attack dash cancel” makes you do a fireball into super fireball by inputting QCF + Punch, Medium Kick + Medium Punch (focus attack), double tap forward (dash), QCFx2 + Punch - that’s a lot of finger tax on what in KOF 15 would be QCF+Punch, QCF+Punch. FADC in SF4 doesn’t feel fun to me, it feels like a chore. So there is a happy medium. But in KOF 15 the satisfaction you get from nailing a combo is, at least for me, much higher than in games with one-button specials.

Again I’m not interested in convincing anyone that special move inputs are The One True Way. Nor do I have any real objection to things like the the Street Fighter 6 easy operation mode. (Though SF6 has so much going on that I suspect an easy control mode won’t help new players much)

What I do want to convince you of is that it’s ok to say “my hands just like doing this thing (shrug).” As a game developer it’s good to drill into why - develop a working theory as to why pulling left-trigger to aim down sights and right-trigger to fire feels better and A to aim and B to fire. But the why comes later - sometimes never. The first step is accepting subjective impressions.

Empiricism and Egolessness in Game Design

Now you might be thinking “if the ultimate argument for special move motions is that they’re fun, isn’t the ultimate counter-argument that they aren’t?” Sure. But if you follow these discussions that typically isn’t the argument that’s used. It’s rare for developers to say “I don’t find them fun”, often because those developers have grown up playing games with special move motions and have a deep appreciation for games with them. The guys making Project L have been part of the Street Fighter scene for decades - do we really believe that they resent fireball motions? (One of them contributed to an old Versus guide for Street Fighter Alpha 2 explaining their complicated hand-intensive way of playing Birdie while holding down 4 buttons…) Often the argument isn’t “I don’t find it fun” but rather “other people might not find them fun.” That’s an ok argument - as a developer you shouldn’t ignore audience preference in favor of your own. But it’s only ok. The most frustrating argument is purely theoretical wank: “Fighting games are strategy games - the platonic ideal is controlling them entirely with your mind.” Says who? (This is less an argument than it is a convenient redefinition)

Empiricism and egolessness in game design is avoiding asserting what’s fun and instead discovering it through observation.

Here’s a passage I frequently mock, from “Against Design”

Look at Shadow of the Colossus for example. What do we, as game designers, know about videogames? Well, we know a few things, we know boss battles suck. We know jumping puzzles suck. We know you get great games by focusing on meaningful interaction and you don’t get great games from aping cinema and focusing on graphics.

“We” can’t actually know these things because they aren’t true. Claiming that any broad mechanic “sucks” or is good is a little silly, but claiming that for jumping puzzles and boss battles is inane - it requires one to believe that Super Mario Brothers is a terrible series. These are flimsy, outright nonsensical assertions that reject empiricism in favor of the magically-obtained special knowledge of well-paid video game literati. By “rejecting empiricism” I mean: anyone can see that people enjoy salty-sweet desserts, or that people enjoy Mario games.

I once loosely belonged to (I was eventually mercifully kicked out of) an online forum of wannabe and some actual game developers with a nasty habit: when they encountered game designs they didn’t like or understand they’d engage debate-bro mode and attempt to browbeat opposition into submission. When Starcraft 2 released to mixed reception they organized forum invasions³ of communities who preferred Starcraft 1, to convince those communities of Starcraft 2’s superiority. They’d create accounts on the offending forum and mass spam Starcraft 2 talking points, berating the inhabitants until they grew quiet. Then they’d return to native soil and high five over their success - as the community they invaded went back to playing Starcraft 1.

You can “prove” that Game A is “better-designed” than Game B when you’re the one defining what “better-designed” means, but you can’t prove that Game A is more enjoyable than Game B - the heart wants what the heart wants, and sometimes it wants Starcraft 1.

Games are full of feel elements that defy real explanation. Jump arcs that use linear motion instead of parabolas are off-putting - I suppose the explanation is that humans are good at recognizing unnatural motion. But in many Mario games his jump is near-linear except at the top and that feels fine. Doom Guy can turn on a dime and run at 70 MPH. It’s common for games to use unnaturally-high gravity because realistic physics feels “floaty” - in that case it’s the natural motion that’s off-putting.

In old Megaman games I jump through boss doors, so that as the screen scrolls I’m stuck in the air. In Castlevania I try to jump and attack when a boss orb falls from the sky, so that I freeze frame in a mid-air attack pose. Once playing Monster Hunter late at night with 3 Japanese players all four of us, without any coordination, jumped and hung from our wirebugs to pose in mid-air at the outro freeze-frame. That stuff is fun.

Why? No idea.

As a game developer you don’t define or dictate what’s fun, you discover it. If that’s true of game feel it’s true of “hand feel” as well - the most literal form of game feel. When players say “my hands just like doing this thing” that’s worth listening to, even if they have no intellectualized explanation as to why. That doesn’t mean that all games should have complex special move motions, or that games should be designed by focus groups. But if as a game developer you find yourself in the position of the French Chef, arguing that the better-tasting dessert is worse because reasons, you’ve probably erred.

1. It takes me a while to write these - it was recent when I started…

2. Electric wind god fist

3. Extremely adult behavior